


epitaph

by hollowdeer



Category: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: Alternate Reality, Character Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-11
Updated: 2019-10-11
Packaged: 2020-12-08 23:40:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20985191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hollowdeer/pseuds/hollowdeer
Summary: Tasha Yar, no matter the time and place, always fought to be where she was.





	epitaph

The war had not hardened Tasha Yar; for she was already a rock. The seas of time parted around her, and they did not erode; they did not take anything with them, not this time. It was a second chance that she was unaware she had been given, but which she knew in the back of her mind would be swept out from under her the same as when the black sea had overtaken her, if she gave it the chance.

And so, when another Enterprise from another time approached, it offered her something that she didn’t know she wanted. Tasha didn’t want to leave. She always kept her eyes forward, to the present, but this past gave her a future.

She felt out of place in her own time, all of a sudden, even though she believed she had always been here. She belonged here, on this Enterprise, in this time, but something had changed in her surroundings, and it hadn’t kept a place for her there.

When the dark eyes of the listener landed on her and lingered, she knew something was wrong. When those words left her mouth and the eyes locked with hers, seeing the confusion swirling in the steel, she shivered but did not break. “A senseless death,” she had said, the words apologetic. They did not surprise her; some part of her had known all of this already in a deeper sense.

She had to adapt to the future charging ahead without her. She had to move on.

Tasha knew that the sea would not stop until it took her again, until it pushed past her and drowned her and left nothing but distant memories in the minds of those who had once known her. But she didn’t want to be reduced to those remnants. She had a life to live, and she wanted to keep living it if it was up to her, no matter the cost.

So, she made that choice. She had fought so hard for her position in life, for the opportunities that she had had to hang on to with tooth and nail. She would keep fighting, keep grabbing at the chance for a better life whenever it came her way. So, she materialized on the deck of the Enterprise-C and watched her old life, the friends and family she had made, disappear into the future.

And when the Romulans fought, she didn’t flinch. She fought back, harder, with all of the injustice in her screaming up from her chest and pushing her onwards. Always forward.

She did everything that she had to do in order to survive.

It was for the best, the greater good. She owed her life, the small happiness she had managed to take from it, to these people, and so she paid it back. For years on end, she paid it back.

When she heard the screams of her daughter in her arms and the ensuing footsteps beginning to take up the chase behind her, she knew what the end result would be before it came. She had tried, again and again, for a chance at a better life. But in the end, her eyes that had always shown with defiance and fury, instead stared straight ahead in defeat.

And she remembered Guinan’s words. _A senseless death. _

She supposed it was inevitable; she couldn’t outrun a certainty like that forever.

**Author's Note:**

> do you ever just remember tasha and get really depressed all of a sudden? she deserved better.


End file.
